Here are some more God-talking articles your afternoon coffee break:For a look at how Christian products are used as evangelical tools, see fav-of-this-blog Stephanie Simon’s piece, which has rerun in several major media outlets (which the folks at GetReligion picked up on, too).
Out of Ur ran a thoughtful piece by Dan Kimball (pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California, and author of Emerging Church and Emerging Worship) who was writing about the end of Willow Creek’s Axis. A good quote: “To be missional to a cultural population that is different in more than age, means looking at everything through a different lens. It means looking at community differently, spiritual formation, evangelism, membership, leadership, communication all through the lens of the new culture and bringing the gospel to them in the unique way that connects to them as any missionary would. This means that the whole culture of a church will change, not just what happens in a worship gathering. That is why only changing the worship gathering is not the answer.” Read the second half here.
A few noteworthy GetReligion posts: Mennonite mania grips cycling fans (hey, that’s my heritage you’re reading about) and Visions of another Magdalene bestseller. Also, Terry Mattingly (a GetReligioner) writes a good piece About those “Left Behind” readers for his On Religion column.
Here’s an older piece about Mars Hill Bible Church’s Rob Bell and his barroom tour. Wish he was coming to my town, heh.
And, finally, here’s another older piece from the NY Times: Watching the Watchers, which looks at the way TiVo and other devices are feeding information about viewers to advertisers and media moguls. Says the article: “The one certainty is that we’ll get a glimpse into viewer behavior of a kind we’ve never had before. That is because we are almost certainly entering an era in which television will begin to watch us nearly as much as we watch it.” Food for thought.
That’s all for now.
(Image: by Mike D on flickr.com)